Waking up to Chaos (or why Fury never seems to get a break)
by MomotsukiNezumi
Summary: The first army we're shown under Loki is the Chitauri. No one ever said he didn't have another one...or that they had to stand down and surrender after he's taken back to Asgard. Orders are orders, after all, and fans will be fans, no matter what world they're from. Let's just hope, for Fury's sanity's sake, that they won't be TOO mischievous, hmm?


**This...this is what happens when I read too many Avengers stories...and Thor stories...and too many stories, webcomics, and word-of-mouth interpretations of Norse mythology. I think I'm a little too biased when it comes to everyone's favorite trickster god, but I can't really help it, I like him. He's a very complex, interesting character, always a bit more layered, and I have to admit, in the movies it was far easier for me to like Loki than Thor. Thor is...well, he's nice, and incredibly friendly, but he's also painfully naive, often arrogant and rude, and he's so reckless and brash that half the time he's onscreen I feel like he's going to end up getting killed, even if that's technically impossible. And don't even get me _started _on Odin, he's _not _winning any awards in the parental department from me. How, it all the nine realms and the seven mad gods that rule the sea, is it possible to be so completely biased towards your offspring? On Asgard, a place where strength, bravery, and brute power are so heavily prized in such a warrior-based society, Loki...Loki, with his tricks, his magic, his way with words...he wouldn't have gotten an easy time of things, especially since magic seems to be considered "weak" in comparison to beating or slashing your opponent to a pulp. In comparison to his "poster child of Asgard" older brother, he'd be considered "inferior". **

** Thor goes on a rampage and slaughters a bunch of Jotnar after being called a "princess", starting massive war between them and Asgard that's only just barely prevented by old One-Eye, Odin himself, showing up to bail his kids out for a stupid stunt...and he gets turned into a mortal and sent to Earth to be "grounded". He doesn't even stay there longer than three days, and he makes friends and gets a girlfriend out of it! How, pray tell, does that equate him having learned his lesson and suddenly ending up all "embrace-the-humans-and-their-ways" thing, when only a few days before he's perfectly fine with going to smash all Jotnar in sight and calling his father an old man and a fool? Three days in "divine time-out" does not equal a sudden dissipation of genocidal urges. **

**Loki has a meltdown over his real parentage and Odin...Odin _falls asleep._ He's just told his adopted, emotionally-shredded son that he was taken from a war-torn planet where he'd been abandoned just because his own people thought he was too puny to keep, and that Loki was essentially a bargaining chip to ensure the treaty. And then he goes for the big sleep...while Loki is meanwhile having a massive internal breakdown from being told he's originally part of a race of beings that he's been taught his entire life are, as far as Asgardian customs go, "the monsters under the bed to scare the children", supposedly completely _evil_. Odin tells him that he kept his parentage secret and lied to Loki his entire life because he wanted to _protect _him? Loki even points out that this might have been avoided if he'd been told his heritage from the beginning! Hiding something so big for long periods of time usually ends in disaster, but he does it anyway! How would Loki be able to be seen as an example that Jotnar can be trusted in Asgard if no one ever even knew about it? It's a little hard to ignore the great big gaping hole in your logic, Odin. **

**And that's not even counting when he was about to fall off the edge into the Void, barely hanging on, and then Odin says "No, Loki." Nice choice of words for your literally-hanging-off-the-edge son who _still _craves your worthless, useless approval, isn't it? **

**That...that's just _wrong._****And if even a couple of those stories in Norse mythology were true...well, it's not really a surprise that he lost it. He always seems to get the short end of the stick, and it's sad, at least to me.**

**By the way, just so you know, I'm firmly part of the "Chitauri-mind-control-Loki-wasn't-entirely-in-his -own-mind-or-was-tortured-into-doing-the-takeover/ conquest-of-Earth-thing" camp. Call me out on it if you want, but I like to believe that there's some hope for him yet. And even if the attempted conquest was entirely his idea and fault...I can't help it, I'd still give the guy a hug, he looks like he needs one. Or a few thousand. **

**So yes, I am a Loki fan. I felt like giving a little more humor to this fandom. **

**WARNINGS: crackfic!, explosions, swearwords in multiple languages, destruction and defacing of Midgardian property (private and otherwise), destruction and defacing of Asgardian property (including the throne room), reference to BBC Sherlock, and a Midgardian-wide fanbase militia/"official" army comprised of armed, dangerous, overprotective, and incredibly creative and mischevious Loki-fans...which have been suitably equipped with enough pranking equipment to ensure that Zonko's and Weasley's Wizard Wheezes are sold out for a good millennia and a half.**

**ADDITIONAL WARNINGS: I am NOT the genius who came up with the fantastic idea of "Loki's Army", I am merely someone who thought it might be fun to add to the archives here as a nice, cracky little oneshot. Although I am the creator of this (albeit unofficial, seeing as I made it up) "pledge of allegiance/theme song" for Loki's Army...**

* * *

In retrospect, S.H.E.I.L.D. really ought to have seen this one coming. In fact, most people, civilian, alien, mutant, or otherwise, should've seen this coming.

But they didn't, and right now, Director Nick Fury was damning everything within sight to the deepest depths of hell because of it.

Pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off the impending headache, he took a deep breath, a long-suffering sigh issuing forth as he stared angrily at the screen in front of him. It wasn't really a surprise why.

Clearing his throat, he tried, for a moment unsuccessfully, to accurately state the absolute _chaos_ on the screen. In the end, he settled for a single, horrified word.

"Dammit."

There was, honestly, no other way to explain it.

The Natural History Museum had reports streaming live of exhibits coming to life in a burst of green sparks, the taxidermy animals and the bleached bones of dinosaurs being ridden as impromptu mounts for crazed teenagers. Japan had somehow become a nationwide cosplay convention, and both Tokyo and Osaka seemed to be locked in a giant mecha-robot wrestling match. India had become engulfed in dancing fever, and now city-wide conga lines and dance numbers burst into action everytime someone so much as mentioned "Bollywood". Russia had discovered only that afternoon that the biting cold lands of Siberia had somehow found all the snow changed to Neopolitan ice cream, and Italy had found itself trapped with a rainstorm of Spanish swimsuit models for the past several hours (although according to reports, no one seemed to be complaining about that last one.). No one in S.H.E.I.L.D. even wanted to _hint _at Broadway's wardrobe dilemma (although it seemed that the noodle incident in Thailand involving the cursed shrimp had something to do with it).

The Eiffel Tower had been swathed in a gauzy layer of sparkling champagne-gold silk, which fluttered and made the most inappropriate fit of magically-magnified giggling whenever tourists happened to walk underneath. Mount Rushmore was reciting dirty limericks every time the elderly passed, and the country of Canada was missing its entire maple syrup supply, which had turned up roughly an hour ago by way of flooding Stark Tower from top to bottom. There was a giant chicken wandering around the state of Montana, pecking crop circles into corn fields and dropping eggs the size of Toyotas in the streets. Florida's lifeguards was still trying to fight off a sudden wave of invading deepsea squid that had decided to terrorize the coastal beaches, and Texas had suddenly found its state borders rearranged into the shape of a giant boot, complete with a cowboy spur. Las Vegas, Nevada had all its neon signs changed to bright pink, and all the casinos had mysteriously turned into meetings for a sudden "Earth child" convention, with liberal amounts of tye-dye shirts and brightly-coloured neckties being passed around.

In Scotland, the infamous Loch Ness monster had surfaced from the deep and had taken to giving the tourists rides on its back across the lake, provided it was given a ginger beer as payment. Australia and New Zealand's sheep and koala populations got swapped round at noon, and the animal activists were going mad trying to ensure that nothing got eaten. The famous London Eye had actually _become _an eye, which had then proceeded to have a staring contest with everyone within a hundred miles. China became engrossed in a nationwide dance number to the soundtrack of _Bye Bye Birdy_, while Vietnam became the hub center of half a million or so computer hacks that gave emails of adorable kitten videos. Several cruise ships heading to the Caribbean found their ballrooms and decks coated in silly string, and the U.S.-Mexico border became neon pink, as if a giant had gone over it in neon highlighter. Hawaii, as of 6 o'clock this morning, appeared to have decided that there were not enough hula dancing contests for the tourists, so a 24-hour state-wide dance contest had broken out, and now all the U.N.'s visiting dignitaries on holiday in Maui were left to wriggle and twist as well as they could in swim trunks, unfortunate sunburns, and brightly coloured floral necklaces as the locals shouted amused incouragement.

Ireland's streets had turned to gold overnight and now the international gold market was going haywire trying to balance prices, and somehow, in all this mess, it took several minutes and a sheepish pointing out from one of the new interns to get anyone to notice that the entire continent of Africa had become painted fluorescent rainbow.

By midafternoon, all the 1950s-themed diners in the United States of America had gotten their food swapped with that of England's pubs, France's topless beaches had become nunneries, San Francisco's entire Comic-Con population had been mysteriously transported all the way across the country to Disneyworld, and Finland and Sweden had ended up playing host to what appeared to be a very, very confused band of tourists dressed in elf costumes, all of whom were insisting that they were North Pole immigrants who'd come to make a life in the shoe business after fleeing the melting ice caps.

In all cases, S.H.E.I.L.D. found only one thing linking all the strange phenomenon together: at each scene, a single symbol was present, either spray-painted, chiseled, etched, carved, burned, soaked, glued, or duct-taped on. Fury's one visible eye bulged with rage as he took in the familiar sweeping horns, the golden metal, and, in place of the head, the words _Loki's Army _crudely sprayed in trickster green, the sharp, neon look reminiscent of the _I Believe in Sherlock Holmes _graffiti movement.

By midnight, the entire globe was as high-strung as ten thousand violins, and Fury's eye twitch was so bad that he'd been offered eye drops and a suggestion for a "more breathable" eye patch no less than a half dozen times. _That little bastard, Thor's got a lot of nerve letting his brother run amok like this after all the stunts he's pulled. _

Patching a call through to Asgard with help from Jane Foster, however, led to a dead end. According the testimony of the guards, the royal family, and everyone else he managed to question, Loki was still in Asgard, magic, at least at the moment, silenced and bound so much he'd be unable to charm so much as a teabag, not this level of insanity. Only intergalactic political protocols kept Fury from living up to his name and doing something drastic to try and get answers...although Thor's famous hammer was not the lesser for helping in persuasion.

Upon returning to base, there was a message for the main screen, delivered by a rather nervous-looking man who held the deceptively fragile-seeming disk in his hands as if it was a live grenade. The recording rolled onscreen within seconds. A black screen became the backdrop for what sounded like a narration...if the narrator was swearing in recruits to what sounded to be the loudest fraternity in history.

_Midgard's become a bit of a bore,_

_So upon the green light, we'll make it less so,_

_With tricks, and talks, and to settle a score,_

_We'll give 'em all hell, make wish that we'd go._

_On knife, on scepter, on our trickster on high,_

_We'll run Midgard a gambit they can't hope to deny,_

_So up in arms, lads and ladies green,_

_Take your tricks and treats with you,_

_The game is on, step out of the unseen,_

_We'll kneel to him, so little ants, shoo!_

The "poem", if it could be called that, was an explosive cacophony of noise in itself, a roaring tumult of sound that shook the screen as an enormous mass of figures become visible, all of different shapes and sizes, but all were clad in an emerald-green cloak, tied with a golden clasp done in the shape of Loki's infamous "reindeer' helm. From the viewpoint available from the recording, the weapons of choice were enough pranking supplies to cover the entire nation for April Fool's Day, along with a handful of what appeared, rather alarmingly, to be duplicates of Loki's throwing knives and the "glowstick of destiny", as well as numerous pieces of medieval clothing and weaponry ranging from arm guards to bows and arrows to shoulder armor to chest plates to replicas of Loki's helm, all engraved in some manner. It was as if a Lord of the Ring's convention become star-crossed lovers with Weasley's Wizard Wheezes and eloped with enough supplies to last until the Zombie Apocalypse.

Fury stared, unable to tear his gaze away from the chanting, the stomping of feet, the excited chatter, the waving of silly-string cans and fake scepters and daggers, the roar of _Loki! Loki! Loki!_ that made his head pound with agony as a headache stampeded through his skull like a squatter's team of musicians from the Sydney Opera House. Though he managed to maintain his composure, every instinct he had was on red alert.

Loki had an army. An army of _Midgard_, of _Earth. _He had a force here made up of _Earth's people. _And judging by the zoomed-in shots at the eyes, these people were _not _under the influence of the aptly nicknamed "glow stick of destiny", either.

"What..what _is _this? Some kind of sick joke? What kind of messed up organization _are _they?"

The words are practically spat out, full of venomous anger and frustration, but the answer comes not from the recording, but the intern sitting at a computer nearby, who shivered slightly, pointing to the screen with a muffled gasp of "Fans...".

Fury stood before the screen for a long, long moment, taking a drink of coffee. His headache is acting up, his patience is thin enough that breathing will tear it, and today's coffee tastes as crummy as if it had been brewed three days ago. As he places a assembling order for the Avengers, a live video feed pops up onscreen of yet another pranking fest. This time, it seemed, all the artwork in the Louvre had come alive and the various naked statues from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were busy streaking their way through the various twisting streets of Paris, the paintings engaging in dirty joke contests and arguments over which age of art was best. A dozen spray-painted copies of Loki's Army symbols plastered the sides of the glass pyramid entryway inside.

The intern by the computer giggled. Fury turned to glare at her, silently demanding to know just _what _was so funny. Stifling her laughter behind a manicured hand, the intern pointed to a corner of the screen, where a gaggle of marble sculptures are gesturing at each other, the leader, it seemed, the statue of a curly-haired cherub who had decided to "moon" a scandalized-looking French statue interpretation of the Greek wine god Dionysus, who promptly called in backup from the loincloth-clad figure of a bearded old man statue with wrinkles like a crab apple and a wickedly-sharp trident. When the Ancient Egyptian section was drawn in, the hall burst into a flurry of movement, and high up above the general din, the sprinkler system went off as a satyr statue crashed into the fire alarm pulley.

The intern laughed again, leaning in to get a closer look as she pointed to the cherub, who had meanwhile found some of the Louvre's more expensive Roman antiquities and had taken to dropping them into the crowd below. "So far, it seems that the Italians are winning, Sir."

As he watches the moshpit of movement onscreen, Fury wondered what he'd done to deserve this. But as he stared at the screen longer, the tiny white imprint of the date shining into the corner caught his eye, and he swore.

April 1st. Oh _no__. _

_April First. Dammit, I'm going to need more coffee. _


End file.
